Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the
acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole
cycle of our operations. Its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it.
Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind
in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with
the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.
The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them
parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely
read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest
possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus
a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it
is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations
as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal
recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
forgotten.
When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of
reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those
methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our
contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are
insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions
corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school,
therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to
do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, and maps, take
measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult
authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often
laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title
of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible training for
the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement
which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the
introduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give
us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better
skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an
entirely different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between
accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into
the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which
once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They
confer precision; because, if you are _doing_ a thing, you must do it
definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you
express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes
impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity.
They beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and
attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's
disciplinary functions to a minimum.
Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such
matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically considered. Manual
training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced
into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to
traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are
destined ultimately to possess.
* * * * *
No impression without expression, then,--that is the first pedagogic
fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something
instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in
continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a
moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression,--the impression,
namely, of what we have done. We thus receive sensible news of our
behavior and its results. We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own
blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or
failure of our conduct. Now this return wave of impression pertains to
the completeness of the whole experience, and a word about its
importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place.
It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally
get some return impression of result, it must be well to let the pupil
get such a return impression in every possible case. Nevertheless, in
schools where examination marks and 'standing' and other returns of
result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural
termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the
sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there are persons who
defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake,
and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here as elsewhere, concrete
experience must prevail over psychological deduction. But, so far as our
psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's
eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal
completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very
definite reasons indeed.
Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects,
unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for
not so doing.
VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
We are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. Man
is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help
determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make
them numerous and perfect. _Our education means, in short, little more
than a mass of possibilities of reaction,_ acquired at home, at school,
or in the training of affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising
the acquiring process.
This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which
underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire
activity of the teacher. It is this:--
_Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on
a native reaction, or a substitute for a native reaction, which the same
object originally tended to provoke._
_The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or
complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic
acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there_.
Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the
teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or
conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him
drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot
make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting
him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react.
He must take the first step himself. He must _do_ something before you
can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or
something bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; for, if
bad, you can couple it with consequences which awake him to its badness.
But imagine a child so lifeless as to react in _no_ way to the teacher's
first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his
education?
To make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case of a
young child's training in good manners. The child has a native tendency
to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also
to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under these latter
conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's
gestures.
Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a
present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch
it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. You then
hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "Beg for it nicely,--so!" The child
stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure;
and that little cycle of training is complete. You have substituted the
new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when
that kind of impression comes.
Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. No
matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reactions
would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression: see,
snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile. But, with memory there,
the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the
earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects
the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes
the 'nice' reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating
all the intermediary steps. If a child's first snatching impulse be
excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be
needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but
in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice.
One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. Such a
diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate
experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful, so I subjoin it.
Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes executed by the
lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them to
the higher centres and connect the latter together, represent the
processes of memory and association which the reactions impress upon the
higher centres as they take place.
In Figure 2 we have the final result. The impression _see_ awakens the
chain of memories, and the only reactions that take place are the _beg_
and _smile_. The thought of the _slap_, connected with the activity of
Centre 2, inhibits the _snatch_, and makes it abortive, so it is
represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the
terminus. Ditto of the _cry_ reaction. These are, as it were,
short-circuited by the current sweeping through the higher centres from
_see_ to _smile_. _Beg_ and _smile_, thus substituted for the original
reaction _snatch_, become at last the immediate responses when the
child sees a snatchable object in some one's hands.
The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the native
reactive tendencies,--the impulses and instincts of childhood,--so as to
be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial
objects.
* * * * *
It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower animals by
having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and impulses than
they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, has not the
marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates have; but, if we
compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that he is
appealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal,
that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate
in a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are
the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width
of imitativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by
the secondary reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus
man loses the _simply_ instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct
is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions
are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts
sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways.
I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive tendencies
which are the most important from the teacher's point of view.
VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
First of all, _Fear_. Fear of punishment has always been the great